35. One of Those Days

Today’s AQI was a healthy 87. And a friend of mine unexpectedly pulled me out to sit in the courtyard of the residence compound. After she had left, I continued to soak myself in the clean air and last few strands of sunlight.

As I pressed play to the album on repeat on my phone, the music transformed the world around me, just as it always does.

The soft rise and fall of the piano accompanied the light breeze as it ran its hands across the garden, sweeping past a kaleidoscope of green. The leaves, from the ones hanging barely off the ground to those on the highest peak of the tallest tree, waved merrily as the wind fluttered by in its translucent spring gown.

The last bits of willow whiteness, the latecomers, the last to leave their homes, they kissed my cheek in farewell as they drifted pass. Homeless. Unbound. Free.

The spring gust also brought around people, fleeting glimpses into unimaginably complex and amazing lives. Behind those faces are hundreds and thousands of untold stories and secrets. Pain. Heartache. Love. Joy. Hope. Dreams of a future that might never be.

When the melody reached a crescendo, I closed my eyes like the shutters of a camera, letting every detail of that moment be imprinted behind my eyelids and itched forever in my memory box. I breathed it all in, letting the beauty fill my lungs and flood my veins to every corner of my body. I become that moment, wholly and completely.

In an instant it was gone, slipped through my fingers faster than fine sand, evaporated so quickly its ghost of a silhouette was all that the light could catch. And I run to a pen, a keyboard, anything so I can jog it down. I hope against hope that putting it in ink will somehow make it last just a little longer. I want so desperately to preserve that flash of rare and refined tranquility, that twinkling of feeling completely blessed and at peace, of seeing the world around me as a miracle, as a place of infinite possibilities for happiness.

Join me in the wild search

Enter your email if you want to receive updates in your mailbox.

Join 389 other followers

Sylvia

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked...I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”